Yikes! Liz McGrath had some adventures in her youth.
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W: I know your Dad. Sweet man, but with his own sort of odd Catholic guilt; sort of a prisoner of it in a way. So tell me about when you started hitting your punk rock phase, in your early pre-teens. How did your folks deal with this?
L: They sent me away to a southern fundamentalist Baptist Christian girls’ home, one step above Pentecostal snake handlers!
W: What was the girls’ home like?
L: Well, My first month there was spent in a four foot by foot sized room called the ‘Get Right With God Room’, an extremely bright light was on all the time, and they played religious tapes on max volume outside my door twenty-four hours a day.
The first week I had to use a bucket for my bathroom and they had groups of girls pray round the clock for me, I could see them through a crack in the door. They fed me only one meal a day and when they found out I was a vegetarian they fed me raw meat. A really fat lady named “Miss Judy” would come in from time to time to sit on me till I could barely breathe; she was trying to “save me from the devil.”
The second week they gave me a pillow and a blanket, and let me out twice a day to go to the bathroom and the third week they let me take a shower – the bathrooms were just a row of toilets and shower heads, no walls, with someone always there to watch you. They finally let me out of the room when I agreed to get “saved.”
Shortly after I was let out, a girl, Carey Dunn, got crushed by a pile of wood while doing her “chores” they would make us do all the construction on the “compound” because they didn't want outsiders to come in. The Palmers, because of their refusal to get medical help right away she died. This caught the attention of the local authorities and finally the FBI shut the school down, but the Palmers reopened it in Mexico calling it ‘Genesis by the Sea’. Mexican authorities eventually shut that school down as well. Then they reopened in a Jay Florida where the Palmers’s son and son in law both work for the sheriffs department, it remains open today under the name Victory Christian Academy.
Brother Palmer, after being accused of raping one of his students, has been court ordered not to be alone with any of the girls, but he still continues to run the school. They think they are doing work of the lord!
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That's the kind of experience that might affect your art.